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Penguin Modem European Poets
Advisory Editor: A. Alvarez
Selected Poems . Vladimir Holan Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905. For seven years he worked in a pensions office in Prague. In 1933 he became editor of the arts reviewZivot (Life), and since 1940 has given all his rime to writing. He has published more than twenty books of poetry, four prose works, and translations of Rilke, Baudelaire, Ronsard, Lermontov, and selected Chinese poets. After 1948 Holan was accused of 'decadent formalism' and, though he continued to write throughout the fifties, no new book, except for a few earlier narrative poems, was published until 1963. In 1965, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, he was granted the highest Czechoslovak literary award and in 1966 the international Etna-Taormina poetry prize for A Night with Hamlet, which has been translated into 11;;ilian.French, German and Swedish.
Selected Poems Vladimir Holan Translated by
With an Introduction by
Jarmila and Ian Milner
Ian Milner
Penguin Books
Contents Introducticm 9 Translators' Note
Penguin Books Ltd, Hannondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road. Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood. Victoria, Australia First published by Penguin Books 1971 Copyright (» Vladimir Holan, 1971 Translations copyright © Jarmila and Ian Milner, Made and printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham Set in Monotype Bembo This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, b~ lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
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WITHOUT
Horoscope 19 No, Don't Go Yet The Hour 21
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16 TITLB 20
ADVANCING
Nothing Mter All 25 On the Pavement 26 Dead Man's Complaint 27 Building the Tower of Babel 21 Death 29 Today There Is . •• 30 In a Village Cemetery by the Suicides' Wall Eodem anno pons ruptus est 32 Encounter V 33 She Asked You 34 Passion Week 35 Smiles 36 Human Voice 37 In the Kitchen 3& The Child 39 Bequest 40 October 41 Presentiment 42 Mother 43 Still Life by a Lake 44 Night After Night 45 Rope ..• 46 Yes or No? 47 Stay 48 Listening to a Record 49
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The Wall
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'Introduction Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905. He spent his childhood in the rolling wooded countryside of central Bohemia but returned to Prague for his secondary schooling. In 1926 he published his first book of verse. For the next seven years he worked in a social insurance (pensions) officeand during this time published two further volumes of poetry. In 1929 he visited northern Italy; the fascination of its architecture, scenery and cultural past colours some of his later poetry. In 1933 he became editor of an arts review, Zivot (Life), but since 1940 has given all his time to writing. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, apart from various selections and anthologies, and four prose works, including Lemuria (1940), his diary of the years 1934-8. When Holan began writing in the late 1920S the prevailing poetic manner, practised by leading poets like Vltezslav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert and Konstantin Biebl, was 'poetism', a Czech adaptation, with its own higWy coloured fantasy and easy charm, of surrealism and dadaism. Holan's early work went along with this mood of avantgarde virtuosity. His early volumes of poetry show a command of inventive imagery, of metre and stmcture, and an unusual skill in verbal play. It is a self-sufficient, Mallarmean poetry of magic ar